


forget the winter

by Herondales



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (rapist was not Pietro), F/M, Incest, POV Second Person, Sibling Incest, Vignettes, codependent bbies, i wish they were shorter vignettes but here they are, implied rape, powercouple, probably a really unhealthy relationship tbh, tried to be as MCU canon compliant as i can be with the info available, vague references to the original Maximoffs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-21
Updated: 2014-09-21
Packaged: 2018-02-18 04:33:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2335439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Herondales/pseuds/Herondales
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The air is cold but you are both burning, inside and out. You don't have the heart to tell her you always knew it would end, so instead you tell her: "You and I, we... we have each other. That's all we'll ever need, Wanda. All." Your voice is rough but your eyes are bright with a promise you never intend to break.</p><p>(...or the recipe for movie-verse Maximoffs, one-shot for now)</p>
            </blockquote>





	forget the winter

 
    
    
    CLOSE YOUR EYES  
    
           AND LOSE THE FEELING  
    
         THAT'S BEEN SINKING

You feel the snow in the pit of your stomach before you can open your eyes to see the ice melting against the cheek of the sleeping sister you hold tightly to your side. Perhaps you only imagine it, but if you look, really look, you can see every individual drop as it lands and merges with the growing blur of white obscuring the entrance to your current residence: a sooty alcove, graciously near a bakery.

It melts in your silvery hair and, like so many times before, you can hardly tell where the cold ends and where you, pale and shivering, begin. That much is inconsequential. Everything melts, or blows away in the wind, or, in a way you will soon find familiar, burns. Everything leaves you but you'll never leave Wanda and you hold to that promise just as your lungs stubbornly hold in breath that freezes you from the inside out.

You think you know cold now but know... _realize_ , when you see others living like you, people with tattered rags as that hang off their bodies like loose skin off bones, that you are seeing people who are far more intimately acquainted. Somehow, your nose is still pink when you catch glimpses of yourself in shop windows, streaking from one dumpster to the next, and your fingers never turn as blue as Wanda's can and _have_ , which is why you now take her hands in yours and bring them close to your face so you can rub and breathe all the warmth you should logically hoard for yourself into her.

> There have only ever been three things in your life that are as reliably present as your own chattering teeth:  
>      dirt,  
>        an empty stomach,  
>          and Wanda.

Your little eye of the storm, you like to call it. You are lost to the world, and yet exactly where you need to be  whenever you bring back a piece of dried meat from a sympathetic but usually unaware butcher or happen upon a line of unattended laundry that seems just slightly overladen and bring your bounty back to enjoy it is with the person you will always weather the storm with. And, oh, you know that there is a storm coming - can feel it in electric jolts down your spine everytime you bolt when someone catches you in the market with heavy pockets, every time you lay your head down on stone or pavement and dream with yours eyes open that, someday, only _this_ will be enough.

That is when you know that it's been too long that you've been giving Wanda two-thirds of everything, when these thoughts creep in, because even your starved brain can't fool itself into complacency for long. It feels like you've been woken up from a hibernation you never noticed you had slipped into in the first place every time you loop back to the fundamentals of the matter: you have Wanda and you have yourself, and that will always be enough.  
  

    
    
      CLOSE YOUR EYES  
    AND   C  O  U  N  T        TO THREE

When you are angry, you remind yourself that you can take to your heels at a moment's notice and there is nothing anyone - even your parents - can do about it. When you remember this, you cannot help the smug slouch of your lips, present even when no one is looking but so much more satisfying when they are, even if when his mother sees it she scolds him or pinches his side and tells him to know his place, as if he doesn't know it already, as if he doesn't already know that it certainly isn't _here_.

It's not that you _never_ tried to fit in with other villagers. (Except that, really, it is.)

They call out to you when you walk home from the shop with a creatively acquired box of sugar cubes, carefully counting each second of each footfall as if it's a game, seeing how long you can resist the temptation to sprint home - "Hey, old man! Still prefer your sister's company to ours, huh?"

You are long used to comments about Wanda and about the silvery-white of your hair, a feature that you yourself cannot explain. Then, as an aside to his group of followers, the one who'd spoken makes a comment that sends his friends into peals of laughter, an obvious play to goad you into coming over, as if provoking you is the best way to recruit you for his band of lanky, sticky-fingered lackeys. And really, it would make sense, because you look just like them on the outside, don't you?

So, you let yourself fall for the trap. If there is anything that gets under your skin, it's an insult.

You pause and the other boy takes a few steps towards you. "You going to share that?"

The boy makes a grab for the box in your hand, moving in what is slow motion only to you, which you dodge before he can even blink. For a fraction of a second, you think that perhaps you should play nice, figure out why the hell this boy who plays with a muddied football all through the summer and has never said a kind word to you beyond _h_ _ello_ always has something to say when you cross paths. For another moment, you wonder if it would be a better idea to tilt your chin upwards, turn around, and walk away. These thoughts all occur in the space between two breaths, between a beat of your heart and the one that follows it, but you are not one to think much before acting so you do what you do best and make due with what you _have_ thought about before curling a loose fist and punching the - older? younger? you can't make it out - boy in the chin.

> There is only one person you can bring yourself to be patient with, and _she_ is always the exception to your rules, no matter how immutable they may be to the world around you.

The boy is caught by one of his friends as he goes sprawling backwards, mouth slack from both pain and surprise, though you suspect it is mostly the latter. Hadn't he expected your response? You steal; you aren't _stolen from_.

You find your way home not much later, scrapes on your cheeks from being pushed into an alley wall and stomach aching from being kicked while you were down. there were more of them, but you are not strong like they are. You had to be fast and smart in your world, you had to be able to look at a challenge and think of it as an invitation to toughen your hide and add a notch to your belt. Now you know that you have to be stronger, too, like a kick to the groin and cruel words is all the impetus you need to accept something already on the fringe of you mind; the world isn't constant, so you must evolve with it.

The blood begins to congeal under your fingernails by the time you knock on the door, bearing evidence of your pitstop but not of your earlier thievery, which works slightly to your advantage. Your mother slaps you across the face before you can stutter out the reason for the fight, but your father might have put his belt to use if you had shown up with yet another covertly obtained object, so you take what you get with hard eyes and a grimace, and an "It won't happen again," that you already know from the simmering heat in your blood is a boldfaced lie.

You know, though, that you will learn and you will repay them someday, just like you will nick another box of sugar cubes to hide from your father under a floorboard by your bed, just like you know you will only ever have Wanda even if right now you have parents and a roof over your head.

Because, even after everything, you have yet to forget the cold.  
  

    
    
    CLOSE YOUR EYES,   _ᗡИIWƎЯ_    ,  
    
    I KNOW JUST WHAT YOU'RE THINKING...  
      
    

In the end, it isn't cold that sends you sprinting from the village, it is accusation and fire. You later think it's ironic in a way that you should have expected.

You remember holding your sister, trembling, in arms that you willed from flesh to iron, from iron to steel, for the fear that if you ever let her out of your grasp the world would snatch her away. You don't ask questions because you have heard whispers that elicit the same fire as the village boys did all those years ago. The silence, you know, is appreciated.

Your anger grows in the silence, though, until you, too, are trembling with the rage that she feels. You close your eyes and lean your forehead against hers, a  _Shhh, Wanda... it'll be alright. you're alright,_  mumbled under your breath because you don't know what else you should say. You want to tell her that you'll kill him - honestly, the thought is far from farfetched. What happened, what was exchanged in hushed voices the last time you'd gone to the main square about her and _him_ , is despicable,  _he_ is despicable, and you can't stand the fact that the salt on Wanda's cheeks when you brush your lips against them is because of what he did. You want to tell her that you will leave that night and leave her tarnished memories behind in this godforsaken place but you know that she has grown to love your father more than you ever could. Even though you have come to realize that this village is poison that you inhale more deeply the longer you stay here, you know that Wanda is ever hesitant to give up judgement and social pariahdom for insecurity.

> ~~Even if you have always liked to think you are all the security she needs, this has changed because you _failed her_.~~

You are holding her like this, eyes closed but heart beating too fast for you to succumb to sleep just yet, when you smell the smoke. At first you try to extricate yourself from her on the bed to see what the matter is, moving purposefully and languidly so as not to wake her, but your first suspicions are confirmed when you see smoke like shadows slithering through the air, gathering in the apex of the roof and pulling a cough from your lungs.

Words pour from your mouth before you can properly formulate them, and then you are tugging Wanda out of the bed and onto her feet, down the stairs, away _away_ _**away**_ from the fire that creeps up on you, that you can see reflected in your sister's eyes. There is screaming from your parents' room that makes Wanda pause, tense and still on the stairs, for a moment, but you grab her hand and only pull her along harder. You only have one concern, and so does she, even if she falters for a moment and forgets.

You gulp breaths of ash and heat for a few moments before you tumble outside the back door of the house, but even after you do not stop, you cannot look back. You thought that you knew cruelty when living on scraps and sleeping on stone, but now you know that you have looked even worse malice in the eye every time you passed a villager who spit at your feet and called you demon-children, called you feral slum rats,  _held you down and forced themselves --_

There is something broken in Wanda as you run down snow-padded streets. The air is cold but you are both burning, inside and out. You don't have the heart to tell her you always knew it would end, so instead you tell her: "You and I, we... we have _each other_. That's all we'll ever need, Wanda. All." Your voice is rough but your eyes are bright with a promise you never intend to break. You drag her into a hug with a hand on a shoulder, rubbing soft circles between her shaking shoulder blades. She whispers apology after apology, and you let her. You know that telling her now that it is not the evil in them that killed the only parents she'd ever known, though you will never tell her you don't feel possessed by some sort of corruption when you are sure that if anyone from the town happened upon you now you would take pleasure in proving them right by being the beast they always treated you as. No, she won't stop apologizing now, but you know that, with time, she will.  
  

    
    
    CLOSE _YOUR_ EYES AND THINK OF      **ME**  .

When they find you, it feels like they have been sifting through a stream looking for gold and mistakenly picked you two out of the river rocks and called you precious. Though he, the baron, says that it is destiny, you think privately that it is chance.

(You have always known that you two are special, one-of-a-kind. It is only a shock to be treated that way, a disparity when compared to the way they were burnt out of their last home like the vermin they were thought of as.)

You do not trust Wolfgang von Strucker. You trust no one. When you are first taken in to his offices, for lack of a better word, you glance at the cool glass of water he presses into your palm with suspicion, with the same thing in your eyes when you look at the man himself. Then, he gives you warm clothes and offers you food that has a taste in your mouth other than _frozen_ and you know that you will not reject his offer.

If anything, seeing Wanda go from round-cheeked to hollow-throated has made you weak to such temptation.

> You did not know when you scrawled your name on a dotted line that it might as well have been a contract with the devil. You do not know that you are signing your life away, but you will soon.

From then on out, they - _snakes_  - are like their foster-people, gypsies being shuffled from one undisclosed location to the next. You pick up a bit of German, pieces of English. Mostly, you learn from leaning into the metal door of the cell that they keep you in, straining to listen to whispers and trailing conversations. They have codes that you know you are not meant to hear, but you are ever impatient and observant so you figure them out anyways.

Quicksilver, they call you. Wanda they call Scarlet Witch. You hear the word 'mutant' exchanged just as much as you hear the word 'miracle'.

You are always alert, focused, buzzing with energy. As long as Wanda is safe, as long as you are safe, as long as you have food and a bed and a roof, you go along with whatever this is. They begin taking blood samples that don't make you wholly comfortable but you know well enough that you signed away your right to say no.

There are always two beds in the rooms they shuffle you into, but only one is ever used. In one of the places where most of the guards speak German, the beds are too narrow to hold you both, so you sleep on the floor with a pillow, arm raised and fingers interlocked with wanda as she sleeps evenly on the bed you lie beside.

Moments like these are the calm before the storm you'd known would come, and you don't realize it until it is far too late to run away.  
  

    
    
    WHY DO WE NEVER  
    
          SHOW ~~ENOUGH OF HAPPINESS~~?  
    
               WHY DO THEY NEVER **SHOW**?

You stay in one place for longer than you have stayed in any of the others. You can tell that the guards and the baron know you are growing suspicious, that your gaze lingers too long on them when they converse in the lunch hall, when you pass them in the cramped corridors. They know, and they do nothing, which only arouses your curiosity more.

"We should leave... This doesn't feel right."

You whisper things to Wanda when she lies awake in bed tucked into your side. There is an invisible tether between you that makes the intimacy you have with her justifiable whenever you are stupid enough to take pause and question it. Now isn't one of those times, so you content yourself with counting each synchronized breath you take.

This closeness is why, one day, when you are bodily forced apart and pulled into a white room that smells like metal and salt you are like the scared little boy you unconvincingly told yourself you never were, yelling -  _Wanda! Wanda! -_  and cursing and banging against the locked door until they restrain you with metals cuffs. She is thrown into the room across the hall, but you hear her protest just as fiercely as you do. 

A doctor comes in not much later. Or a scientist, you can't tell anything but the pristine white of his coat. He hums to himself but tells you nothing, so you keep you mouth shut and watch. Watch him prepare a syringe with liquid that should not be glowing slightly blue even in the fluorescent lights but somehow _is_. Watch that same needle go into a vein in your arm, feel another ghosting over your jugular. Your only thoughts are of Wanda, of the silence coming from the room across the hall. Is that a good sign? Or the opposite?

It takes a few minutes for whatever is supposed to happen to actually happen, but you know down to the second exactly when it does. Electricity thrums in your veins, behind your eyelids when your eyes finally slam shut of their own accord. You bite down on your tongue until you taste blood in an effort not to cry out, but it's only a matter of time before the pain is too great not to voice. In phosphenes you see colors that do not exist, born of your mind's desperation for a distraction from the feeling of being torn down and rebuilt.

> You have been in pain before, lungs heaving in fire instead of air and fingers so cold they feel like lead against your cheeks and bruises swelling from fights with empty boys who try to look like men just as hard as you do. This is a different sort of pain, a pain that grows from your very center and floods your nerves in a way you can't prepare yourself for.

You mumble and yell and gasp words you don't understand, the only familiar thing among them a name you know better than your own. You imagine that she is in pain like you are, that she needs you and, _again_ , you aren't there for her, and that makes the throb of ice in your veins worse. 

Sometime after that your hands are chained together behind your back and you are marched to a cell like the prisoner you have finally proven to be. The guards move as if their limbs are trapped in molasses, and you almost urge them forward, but your tongue feels heavy in your mouth and no words come out. Foreign screams plug your eardrums, and as they build in intensity you pray that they do not come from your sister. You pray, when you see something in a black bag being rolled away on a gurney, that she is not there, that she is safe, that she is whole. In your life, there is not a moment where you thought you needed faith more than you think so now.

Relief floods your vision when you see Wanda in the cell next to yours, and as soon as you are freed and led inside you rush to her, frantic and erratic, and press your palm to hers through the thin bars. What was done to you? What will they do next? The answers don't come fast enough, just like nothing ever will again. Finally, they don't come at all. _A_ _ll we have is each other._  
  

    
    
    ... AS IF THAT'S NOT REASON ENOUGH  
    
    I NEED ANOTHER REASON WHY.

They train you. The baron and his snakes teach you to use the powers they have bestowed upon you, even though you know that the reverse is just as true. You give them power, leverage, a weapon. You and Wanda - the twins - Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver. They expect you to be grateful and you secretly expect the same of them.

Sometimes days pass before you are in the same room. You think that they are scared of you together, of what you can do. Eventually, you earn their trust. You are theirs but before that you are each other's. You work, learn, breathe better as a unit and they aren't stupid enough not to see it. You don't know what they have done to you but you know that it has made what you already had even stronger, somehow deadlier. You feel intrinsically like the weapon they have made you.

You wait for what seems like years - what might even _be_ years for all you know - before you are given a semblance of freedom. Moved from one base from the next, hearing more whispers about gods and monsters and abominations that you wonder might be what they call _you_ one day, if they don't already. You are a string pulled taut enough that being pulled too much in one direction would pull you apart, already beginning to fray. Tense and anxious, energy rolls off of you in waves. You think you are ready for whatever war they mean to unleash you upon.

They need you, the baron says one day, watching you blur up to a man - _dispensable,_  they call him - and wrap both your hands around his neck. Training, they call it. You thought it was torture at first, such a long time ago. Now? It is almost sport. Strucker nods his head, and you take it like a gladiator would take the downturned fist of his emperor, squeezing tightly and snapping abruptly to the side. Bloodless, guiltless. You are a machine, and Hydra your operator.

You don't cringe. You can't afford to - not anymore. 


End file.
